A team of astronomers released spectacular new views of Jupiter a week before NASA’s Juno spacecraft is set to arrive at the gas giant.
By Amy Thompson | MOTHERBOARD
The images will be used to create high-resolution maps and will help scientists better understand the planet’s interior prior to the spacecraft’s arrival.
“Over the past five to six months, we’ve been making regular observations of the giant planet,” Leigh Fletcher, team lead from Leicester University said during a Google Hangout today. “We want to better understand what the planet is like today, before Juno’s arrival.”
The high-resolution maps and images were created by combining data from VISIR (a thermal camera on the Very Large Telescope) and the TEXES spectrograph on NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii to produce the first global spectral maps of Jupiter taken from Earth.
